I’m not nostalgic for childhood. Childhood was terrifying—the lack of agency, the grownup world’s opaque set of rules, the playground’s ferocious pecking order, the fear of real and imaginary things. And so I’m grateful that Shirley Camia’s Children Shouldn’t Use Knives and Other Tales shreds the yellow ribbons of childhood sentimentality and, instead, offers an exploration of what it feels like to be small and vulnerable in a stormy world.

Children Shouldn’t Use Knives is a collection that integrates moody poetic fragments by Camia with elusive sketches of telescopes, book stacks, flower garlands, and children draped behind blankets by Cindy Mochizuki. Quotations from nursery rhymes and beloved children’s authors—including Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, E.B. White, Judy Blume and so on—open each of the eleven sections, anchoring Camia’s work with familiar wisdom that illuminates the ominous facets of youth. Camia’s original poems and Mochizuki’s complementary illustrations conspire with the famous authors’ quotations to create a shadowy, dreamy atmosphere.

Children Shouldn’t Use Knives acknowledges the dangers and threats that haunt children beyond the realms of nightmares and classic scary fairy tales. For example, “In the Spring” does away with stereotypical optimistic associations with the season:

what defencesdoes a younggirl have

as angerbarrels down

the muzzle of a gun

Mochizuki’s illustration of a young child kneeling and holding an unidentifiable implement takes on a dark valence to accompany Camia’s brusque poem.

Similarly, “Life’s Lessons” evokes with a few short lines a difficult story about a child lying about the whereabouts of her uncle:

No, I don’t know where he is.

what she saidto the menat the door

Camia peddles in subtle ambiances rather than ornate descriptions and so the slight poems tremble while casting long and enigmatic silhouettes—the collection is a shadow puppet show where small hand gestures become animated monsters. While Children Shouldn’t Use Knives recalls Edward Gorey’s Victorian-inspired gothic The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Camia’s playground of lost children is softer and more modern.

With only eleven brief poems, the collection is very short. While I appreciated Camia’s invocation of well-known children’s literary authors who don’t shy away from the confusion and trouble of childhood, I did find the extracts drowned out Camia’s own voice at times—they were often as long as the poems themselves. I found I wanted a few more poetic moods from Camia. I wanted to inhabit her and Mochizuki’s beautiful, sombre world for a few more beats—just like when I was a child and I couldn’t stand having a story come to an end.

Adèle Barclay’s debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016), won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is an editor for Rahila’s Ghost Press and the 2017 Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women in Literary Arts. She teaches at UBC.

The radiant poet Adèle Barclay is here to discuss furry armpits, fuzzy legs, pretty pubes, and why having hair makes her feel feral and alive! Adèle is all about the pursuit of joy, and shaving just doesn't factor into that joy. We also chat queerness, the politics of hair care, and why grooming in service of a partner can be soul-crushing, totally fun, or somewhere in between. If you love discussions that overcomplicate issues of beauty and womanhood, then oh boy oh girl you're in for a treat.

A maternal figure in my life recently wrote me to say she struggles with poetry precisely because it exists as a place between thinking and feeling—a place we’re out of the habit of visiting, let alone dwelling. But then there are some poems that shake you and bring you back to the space that flickers between pathos and logos. Kai Cheng Thom’s a place called No Homeland is the hearth of such a real yet imagined place. These are poems that live with paradox, straddling both myth and reality. In a place called No Homeland, Thom transposes the energy of queer punk spoken word onto the page. The result is a vulnerable, shimmering debut.

Throughout the collection, Thom commits to bringing queer, trans, and racialized bodies to the forefront. The inaugural poem, “diaspora babies,” tells us there are “stories that are never told / but known / nonetheless we bake them into bread / fill buns with secrets.” For Thom, these repressed histories endure despite their marginalization. They exist materially and spiritually in unexamined corners and baked into daily bread, nourishing the poet. Later in the poem she writes “some poems / cannot be written / just felt,” inviting us into her poetic (no) home—that space between thinking and feeling. These invocations initiate us into the world of the collection where tales of the oppressed emerge from their “invisible ink” and “ghost children drawing maps in the margins” sing themselves into vibrant existence.

What unfolds in the following poems are new geographies, both difficult and sublime. Thom transforms Vancouver into a “concrete rainforest / sequestered in silence / sea-hungry cavernous” in “downtown beastside,” blending mysticism and grittiness in a way that resonates sincerely with the fraught cityscape. Similarly, “the river” begins with a covert lesson in oral history and geography:

someone told me once that a secret river flowsunder every street in every chinatown in every city

The poem sprawls beautifully, proceeding gently, at first, with the soothing alliteration:

this river speaks in a secret language that sounds like a sighand stretches

And then the poem rushes into the rapids of brutal revolution: “darling, when your revolution comes, i will not be here, / when the towers start to burn, i will be the first to die.” Many of Thom’s poems deploy this bold, storytelling voice, foregrounding the wisdom of what is said, experienced, lived, rumoured, and gossiped in lieu of traditional history with its myopia of normativity. a place called No Homeland consistently examines the collisions that marginalized identities encounter. And through this, Thom finds, “there is a poem waiting deep below.”

Adèle Barclay’s poems and criticism have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM international, The Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016). She is the 2017 Critic-in-Residence for CWILA. She lives in Vancouver.

“Where are our time machines?” asks the narrator in “Dear Sara I,” the first poem of Adèle Barclay’s debut collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You. Pulsing with an old-world, occult feel, Barclay’s poetry draws the reader back in time with its tarot readers, bearded ladies, riding caps, griffins, and witchery. Alcohol, cigarettes, and erotic desire lend a theatrical, 1920s-era noir feel to the reading.

Yet Barclay’s poems are both contemporary and relevant. Millennial anxieties are a common thread (“I’m so tired / I can’t even curate / a good life” or “our stupid hands / scratching at glass screens”), as is the desire for digital-era connection (“I watched the new Grimes video / hoping to find you in feathers”). The wry, often humorous voice of the narrator feels intimate and familiar, like that of the friend you’re in a semi-permanent state of physical separation with but still speak to every day, by “dial-up telepathy,” text messages, and handwritten letters. But here, the longing is also carnal, marked by blood, bruises, blisters, and body heat. If I Were in a Cage wonders aloud whether closeness is sustainable from afar.

A variety of expertly rendered settings reinforce this question. Within the first two poems, Barclay moves from the “slick jaws / of Brooklyn” to small-town Ontario, where “a grunge trio’s name / references Alice Munro.” In Montréal, “darkness in winter is anyone’s game,” while the Pacific Northwest is all “witchery, rain, chanterelles, and moss.” “I have destinations / to tally” writes Barclay, and whether it’s San Bernardino, Paris, Michigan, or rural Alberta, her deftly observed details safeguard the reader’s perception of each place.

“There’s language / and then there’s language” claims the narrator in “Grammar by the Minute,” and Barclay’s language is both keen and vivid (“The faucet / is a siren, the pipes freeze a rusted melody”), while sensations are contorted (“I’ve / turned Saturn / in my mouth / like an olive pit”) to defy our expectations. At times, it feels like Barclay is a magician pulling back the curtains of perception and memory to reveal something more enduring. The opening poem is one of six Dear Sara’s interspersed throughout this collection, and by “Dear Sara VI,” the final poem, time has passed and place names have changed, but it’s love that appears to endure. In its exploration of intimacy, If I Were in a Cage is at its most reverent and mystical.

Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt’s fiction has recently appeared in (parenthetical), Matrix, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, and Room’s Canadian Gothic issue (39.3). She lives in Montréal, where she is at work on her first novel. Visit her at carlyrosalie.com or follow her on Twitter @carlyrosalie.

Tess Taylor’s Work & Days performs a moral, political, material, spiritual environmentalism. This calendric cycle of twenty-eight poems studies the relationships between the local and global, and organisms and their changing seasonal landscape. In Work & Days, Taylor casts the physical attributes of the ecological world in a deeply poetic light.

A poet, avid gardener and cook, Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship, which secured her a rent-free cottage for a year in Western Massachusetts. Her plans to write in isolation and finish her first book of poetry shifted when she chose to intern on a farm instead. The daily tilling informed her writing and she began to compose poems to track the labour of small-scale agriculture.

The resultant collection emotionally bears the signs of this quotidian physical labour—its pacing articulates how time becomes qualitative when tended to ecologically rather than when we regard it as a finite resource under neoliberalism. In contrast, Work & Days keeps qualitative time: “Branches shuttle icy rosaries”, “They cut a furrow—a line between the winter and the spring”, “As we slice, the day hovers / Soon it will not”. Taylor measures out days and seasons with earthy, embodied images.

The turn to the pastoral in Work & Days isn’t a refuge or escape from modern anxieties. Taylor’s speaker is a citizen and organism, caught in political and environmental webs. Her poems contain the awareness that “we are not self but species.” The poem “Apocalypto for a Small Planet” opens with “& the radio reports how in 2050 / farming Massachusetts will be like farming Georgia— / all’s flux, no one can say what will grow in Georgia.” While the poem grapples with cynicism and helplessness in the face of global warming—the speaker’s friend “says my hunger / to be near zucchinis // will not save the planet from real hunger”—Taylor’s deft lyric holds all the tensions of living under the threat of ecological disaster and degradation. The poem endures to beautifully suggest “these cucumbers are more art than science” and, despite all uncertainty, the speaker returns to the small but mighty task at hand: “here I work a plot that also grounds—”

Taylor knows the poetic pathways of Hesiod and Virgil that lead to farming the land and she brings her own wry yet sincere modern sensibility to the genre of the pastoral. The speaker contemplates her exigency and place in relation to her proximate ecosystem and larger global systems. In “Elsewhere Food,” she observes concerns both immediate—“Failures gnaw the crop”—and faraway— “Elsewhere famine, elsewhere flood. / Rainforest clear-cut for pasture.” Taylor’s strength is that she brings both the local and global perspectives into view. Deceptively quiet and simple, Taylor’s poetic vision grasps both granular textures of the seeds she plants in the earth and the looming, pressing concerns blooming on the global scale.

Adèle Barclay’s poems and criticism have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, PRISM international, The Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016). She is the 2017 Critic-in-Residence for CWILA. She lives in Vancouver.

Welcome to CanLit Shout Outs, Room's new monthly blog series. On the first Sunday of every month, I will post a list of recent publications, awards, and other literary accomplishments by past and present Room contributors, board members, contest judges, interviewees, and friends. Think of this as a "what's-awesome-in-CanLit" celebration by someone who likes books a little too much, or, better yet, as your monthly feminist shopping list.